


paper lace

by arbitrarily



Category: True Detective
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-23
Updated: 2014-02-23
Packaged: 2018-01-13 13:04:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1227421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>You always short-change the wrong things.</i> 1995: Maggie puts her house in order.</p>
            </blockquote>





	paper lace

**Author's Note:**

> Written after 1x05 "The Secret Fate of All Life." General spoilers apply. It's highly probable the next three episodes could render everything written here non-compliant with canon; in that case, consider this an AU.

 

 

 _i heard you’re suffering_  
_come be a wild thing  
_ SUNSET RUBDOWN

 

 

 

 

 

**1.**

“I know you’re mad,” Marty says. “I know that I have ... I’ve made you mad. But you, you are my wife, and I – ”

Maggie stabs a finger at the stop button. The answering machine cuts Marty off mid-sentence, just as his indignation crests and begins to crash down angrily. Messily.  

Silence expands outwards into the house, as though emanating from the machine itself. She stares at it, the blinking red light promising her more. There’s penance in listening, she thinks, without having to articulate her own sins.

She presses play; Marty’s voice cracks when he says, “ _please_.”

   

 

 

 

**2.**

Maggie with her hands in dirty dishwater. Maggie with her hands submerged, the water still too hot despite the grease, the scraps of dinner bloated and dissolving at the bottom of the basin. Her skin is too thin so it burns. 

In the winter months her fingers crack and bleed but there is no cold to blame, not here. Always that same thick, damp creeping heat, keeping close company like an uninvited guest. The hedge-clippers snap, her shoulders redden if bared to the sun too long, the girls don’t listen when she calls their names.  

Maggie cuts vegetables for dinner, an efficient guillotine chop into ripe flesh as she avoids her own. She boils water on the stove, she drops to hands and knees as she scrubs the bathroom floor. The work rarely serves as a distraction for her. If anything, it offers more time for her to dwell. In the laundry room Marty’s dirty shirts stink of stale smoke and spilled beer, dried sweat like an offering to her, putrid and male, evidence of a life lived she will not, cannot, share in. 

Maggie burns the inside of her arm on the iron as she reaches for a shirt. She hisses under her breath. In the same room Marty watches LSU play Alabama, but he talks about the Saints. 

 

 

 

 

**3.**

“He’s been working with you, for what? How long now?”

“Long enough,” Marty had said, the grimace audible in his voice. He untucked his shirt from his pants, his belt already unbuckled, yawning as he took to the buttons down his front. 

“He should come by. Bring him on over to the house, I’ll put something together, and it – it’ll be nice.”

Marty sighed. “Mags, he’s. He’s what you might call the difficult sort.”

“The difficult sort.” Maggie smiled to herself. She rubbed her hands together, still slick with the lotion she had just applied. “Lucky for me, and for him, I have plenty of experience on that front.”

“Cute,” Marty said. She caught his reflection in the mirror but he wasn’t looking at her. 

She turned to face Marty, her arms folded across her chest. “He’s a part of your life now, Marty. And that makes him a part of mine, too.” She took Marty’s wrinkled shirt off the bed and dropped it into the hamper. 

“Bring him by to the house,” she said.

 

  

 

 

**4.**

Rust comes over to the house uninvited and unexpected twice. 

The first is after she left Marty, after she made Marty leave. After she saw Rust in that diner, watched him walk away. He comes to her door, unannounced, bruised paper-thin skin under his eyes. She recognizes that look but doesn’t want it to apply to him.

She holds the screen door open, her shoulder pressed against the door jamb. When he leans his body against the open door the hinges whine in protest. 

“Maggie,” he says, a nod in greeting, mouth grim. “Mind if I ...?”

“Sure,” she says and his body brushes against her own as he passes, enters into the house, heat an exchangeable property between them. He moves slow, but with purpose, before he settles himself on the couch, hands clasped between his bent knees, head dropped forward.

Maggie steps into the room, switches on a lamp, stands over him. 

“You alright, Rust?”

He looks up at her suddenly. “Yeah,” he drawls. “Just needed to catch my breath is all.”

She nods as if that means something to her. It does and it doesn’t. She knows how it feels to be that lost, that caught up, left that breathless. She doesn’t know what it means to him. She fidgets beside him, still in her scrubs. She’s on the point of offering him something to drink for lack of anything else worth saying when he speaks.

“The girls sleeping?”

“My parents’,” she says before she sighs. She sits next to him on the couch, the room rendered unfamiliar by the encroaching dusk, Rust’s presence. “It’s easier,” she hears herself say, “when I’m working.”

Rust doesn’t say anything and Maggie sighs again. “I’m sorry,” she says. Rust’s head darts, turns to face her full on, a cast of surprise to his features. “For last time. I was mean,” she says, a self-conscious laugh building in her, “and I didn’t need to – ” 

Rust stops her with a firm hand on her wrist. Her voice stops the second his skin touches hers.

“Don’t,” he says, and when she nods, eyes drawn to his hand, the curled fingers, her wrist, his grip tightens. His hand is clammy and hot, the house too quiet.  

Maggie keeps searching for comfort in emptiness. The empty house, empty thoughts, herself emptied out of anything potentially wrong and dangerous. When she looks at Rust – his hand, his tired face – she can see this as an incorrect approach. 

The second time he comes to her is long after that. Like a dream in slow motion, the kind that leaves you fearful and doubting yourself through the stretch of the day, long after you wake up.

The second time he visits, uninvited, unexpected, he takes her wrist in hand again. That second time he takes a lot of things from her. He takes everything she offers.

 

 

 

 

**5.**

Here are three secrets Maggie keeps from herself:

1\. She had wanted sons. She does not know when that particular secret had hardened itself, calcified into something mean and unforgivable inside of her, but she acknowledged it for the first time when she was pregnant with Audrey. Sat out on her mother’s back porch (never her father’s, never joint ownership, always her mother’s) and she had looked at her mother with little more than barely tolerant disappointment and pity. She knew then if the thing inside her proved to be a girl, in time Maggie would be recipient of the same. She knew girls were more difficult to govern than boys. That there were too many ways for a girl to go wrong. 

2\. She has distrusted Marty for years. Suspicion and doubt arrived as easy as any expected marital love and affection during that first year. She accepted it that first year, she accepted him, and only in secret considers this her mistake. She can thread the causality back to her for allowing Marty to be this man, the one who can lie while looking her square in the eye. This distrust lives like a monster under their bed, slithering out to keep her company the nights she lays alone, Marty’s side of the mattress cold. 

3\. The third secret is new to her. The third is still too bright, too sharp and shameful for her to touch on, even in these self-denying moments. The third involves Rust and the way she allows herself to imagine him. Rust in their house, Rust in her kitchen. Rust inside of her. 

  

 

 

 

**6.**

Rust always answers the phone the same way.

He will say, “This is Cohle,” his voice pitched dark and low, suspicious, as though he has been snatched out of a landscape only he can see.

“It’s Maggie,” she will say, and then offer him a question. About Marty (always Marty), about Texas, about prospective home repair that will go unattempted. 

After a time Maggie stops inventing reasons to phone him. She calls simply to talk, because she considers him a friend – a pattern of phone calls established (not a pattern, just favors) between them. 

She invites him to dinner. She does this often, neighborly and charitable, offering him a seat at their table. He rarely accepts. She invites him to dinner only when Marty is also still seated at that table. Only when they are living under a shared roof. She can count on one hand the number of times Rust accepts. The number of times he eats dinner at that table, with her children and her husband and her food.  After, after Marty and after the invitations cease, their conversations continue, brief as always, akin to a sudden buckshot of mutually desperate communication before static settles again. Maggie seated in the TV room, an informercial coloring the walls in bright light, sound muted, lamp off. Tired, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She’ll refuse to take the cordless with her to bed. Refuse to take his voice with her there. She’ll listen to his voice and imagine a world where they could be good for each other, but that comes after.

The number of times he accepts is three. 

 

 

 

  

 

 

**7.**

Maggie with her hands in dirty dishwater, Rust by her side. This is the second time he stays for dinner. She washes dishes, passes them to him. He dries them. He has his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows, tie loosened, collar open. She catalogs his appearance without intention or agenda. 

She had fought him at first. Took the dish towel from him when he picked it up, followed her into the kitchen like a stray. “You go. Sit with Marty, the girls. You’re a guest.”

He took the towel back from her. “And as your guest I aim to earn my keep, or at the least, express my gratitude.” She laughed as she reached for a casserole dish and placed it in the sink. 

Now, Marty’s voice on the phone carries to them through the house, one side of a conversation, boastful and sure. One side of a story told with male bravado. 

“How’s that case going?” Maggie asks Rust. She turns the tap and adds more hot water. “That girl in Erath,” she adds unnecessarily.

Rust inclines his head towards her. 

“Marty doesn’t tell you.” Down the hall Marty stutters into a laugh. 

Maggie stills, the flat of her hand holding down a plate beneath the level of the water. “No. Marty doesn’t tell me anything.”

So Rust tells her. She washes, he dries. She finds calm reassurance in the ugly things he tells her. 

Maggie catches their paired reflection in the darkened window over the sink. The girls’ voices merge with their father’s, different notes hit, tinny cartoon soundtrack of the television underscoring them. Rust’s gaze meets hers in the window. She lets herself imagine them as strangers, alone on the outside. Looking in. 

 

 

 

 

**8.**

It is strange to learn to want again. She thought she had everything. There was a vision, a portrait, of a life worth living. She had that. To want anything more would be unchristian. 

She wants so much more. She’s a girl who went wrong. 

 

 

 

 

**9.**

“This is delicious,” Marty says, a forkful of meatloaf at his mouth. “You made this?”

“Sure,” Maggie lies. Marty nods in approval and she finds she hopes he secretly does not believe her. That he knows she bought it ready-made at the market, her effort with this dinner as half-hearted as her lie. Neither speaks after she replies. Their silences have come to say more than actual words could. The girls fill the table with their bright chatter, an unknowing buffer populated with lightning quick subject changes and names Maggie does not always recognize. 

They married too young was a thing Maggie initially kept expecting to hear about her and Marty but those words never came, not from anybody but herself.  She kindled that expectation within her, craving this validation.  Because they had been too young. She had been all skinny long legs and boyish hips, summer freckles over the bridge of her nose, long messy unkempt hair, her boldness attractive and encouraging – she had been young. 

And so had he.

Marty and his impotent masculinity. She doesn’t mean sexually, but she’s grown since nineteen and what she has grown to learn, and perhaps even mourn, is that there is a vital piece missing from her husband. Self-awareness, a vital piece it takes to be a man. Marty does not keep secrets from himself. How can he, when he doesn’t even know they’re there.

He had been the first man she ever loved, and without meaning to, she had made the intuitive leap that meant he’d be the only man she’d ever love.

Marty cleans his plate. With a triumphant grin shaped like a challenge he reaches for seconds. 

 

 

 

 

**10.**

Maggie loves to cook, she hates to cook, there’s a terrible loneliness she has come to associate with that kitchen. The phone tucked under her chin as she drops peeled potatoes into a pot. After they boil she will mash them. She does not report this plan to her mother or Jen or whoever else is on the other side of the telephone tucked beneath her chin. She says instead, The girls have ballet on Tuesdays and Thursdays now, four to five, it’s nice to have the house to myself like that, it’s real nice. She’ll say it without knowing if she believes herself. Her mother or Jen or whoever else will say, twice a week already? And Maggie will say the name Pavlova as a joke, and the feminine voice on the other end will say, faraway and absent, What’s that now?, and Maggie will find the joke does not merit an explanation, that the potatoes don’t merit mashing, that this house demands her loneliness. Nothing, she’ll laugh, and like a collector of unwanted and discarded things a quote will float back to her. That night she will wash her face, her face wet and pale, young but tired, and she will recall: If I can’t dance then I’d rather be dead.

 

 

 

 

**11.**

Marty leaves. She makes Marty leave. And then, Marty comes back.

“For someone so critical,” Maggie’s mother said, “you’re entirely without resolve.”

Maggie stabbed her fork into her slice of pecan pie, didn’t eat any of it. “I did wrong when he left, and wrong now that he’s back.”

“You did wrong when you married the man,” her mother said casually. She was looking to the lake not Maggie. And even this, an indictment against Marty, read as a criticism of herself. 

 

  

 

 

**12.**

The first casualty of a failed marriage is a lesson in pronouns. What was once ours is now yours or mine, or yours and mine together but that is not the same thing as ours. It is not shared in the same spirit. There are now the things that are his just as there are the things that are hers. 

An emphasis on the concept of ownership is new to Maggie. She has not lived her life in either greed nor fear, never felt an impulse to gather all the people and things that matter to her chest and declare: these are mine. 

This is another casualty of a failed marriage: she clutches lost things to her breast, makes them her own. 

Marty is no longer her own, but that also means she is no longer his.

Reciprocity is lesson three. 

  

  

 

 

**13.**

Maggie and the girls eat McDonald’s in the car. The girls sit in the backseat, still clad in black ballet leotards, picking cheerfully at their Happy Meals, Maggie sucking down a chocolate shake. In front of them is an office: John Oglive, Attorney-at-Law. 

Maggie snags a couple of her daughter’s french fries. 

It’s 1995 and she doesn’t go into his office yet. 

 

 

  

 

**14.**

“Is he a good man, you think?” It was the only time she brought Marty up to Rust on the phone after Marty left. After Marty left, he became a landmine she skirted in conversation, struggling to keep her tone casual and airy and light.

“He’s a man,” Rust sighed. “The spectrum of morality can apply any which way you choose it to bend.”

 

 

 

 

**15.**

Intimacy is easy to achieve with Rust. It’s natural. They both slide into it like it’s a place that’s been waiting for them for a long time. Like all they had needed to do was find each other. 

Rust comes over with Marty, mid-afternoon on a Sunday. Maggie with wet hair, fresh from a shower, old white t-shirt, cuffed ratty jeans, her feet bare. She wants to call them the boys as they noisily enter the house but the word sticks wrong. They enter the way boys would though: guilty faces, sweaty shirts, tousled hair. Marty’s mouth curled sullenly as remains of an argument. Rust’s face tense but oblivious. 

Maggie smiles. She says, “Still working that case?” It’s less a question and more a statement, a story or an alibi for them to slide into. 

“Ah, Maggie,” Marty says, rubbing at the back of his neck. This is his way of saying, “We do not talk of this.” There is a long list of things they no longer speak of, and each time Maggie attempts to edit that list, pare it down, she is greeted by that same, “Ah, Maggie,” the list of unspeakable things unspeakable itself. 

Marty goes out to the yard to greet the girls, a shout back to Maggie from the door, “Get the corn cooking, we’re gonna do ribs.”

Maggie doesn’t get the corn cooking. Maggie sits cross-legged at the kitchen table, her wet hair leaving a ring around her collar, dripping down her back. She knots it up loosely, damp strands catching against her cheek, her neck. She bats them away. 

From the chair beside her, at the foot of the table, Rust stares at her. Marty calls to the girls as he gets the ribs going, and one of them (Macie, she’s sure it’s Macie) chirps back to him. Maggie sips the lemonade she poured. It’s too tart. Lisa will be on her front stoop in five days, but she doesn’t know that yet.

“What?” she asks, pushing that loose wet hair off her face again. 

He shakes his head, a tiny measured movement, a faint smile almost trying at his parted lips. His fingers move over the pooling condensation sliding down the side of his glass. 

“You look just the way I imagine you look.” He says it like a riddle, the way most things spring from him as quietly considered personal philosophy. 

Maggie smiles in confusion (and flattery, something terrible, something else), a laugh building. “I only exist because you will it?” she teases, a note of incredulity bleeding through her tone.  

The light in him shutters out for a beat, and she knows that wasn’t what he meant at all. She likes that. 

“No,” he says softly, patient. His fingers are wet and they tense against the glass. “When I think of you,” he says, and if he leaned further in their knees would touch, if he said it any softer it’d sound less like a truth and more like an emotion, “I picture you. Like this.” 

She likes that too. 

 

 

 

 

**16.**

Maggie is not easily discouraged. Maggie sets Rust up with her friend Kathleen. 

This will prove a failure. It’s 1995. The only stint at matchmaking by Maggie that succeeds is Laurie, but Laurie will come later, not in 1995. Laurie will be a separate story, though one that repeats itself all the same: a success first, and then a failure.  

Picture the four of them at a restaurant that first date. The four of them, so Maggie has taken Marty back. It’s a date for Marty and Maggie as well, the awkwardness new and shared amongst the four at the table. She finds it easier to look to Rust than Marty. Rust looks at no one, his eyes trained on the wood grain of the table. 

The second date, at Longhorn’s Tavern, a separate story that repeats. Marty orders pitchers of beer, they drink them, they dance. They swap partners, Maggie’s body pressed against Rust’s, his hand hot, flexing at the small of her back. He smells warm, familiar.

“She likes you.” Maggie aimed to say it against his ear but her words meet his jaw instead. She watches it clench and his fingers replicate the same against her spine.  

“And she is lovely,” he replies, his tone kind but noncommittal. 

She will never tell him what Jen had said to her about him. How she was relieved Rust never called her. How she said she couldn’t explain it but he was the saddest man she had ever met, that he made her sad by virtue of knowing him. 

Maggie glances to Marty with Kathleen and finds him watching no one but the door. The three of them are obligations to Marty. Rust’s shoulder bunches under her hand. He shifts rather than dances closer to her. 

“Two dates,” Maggie says, a reminder and a running count. 

“Not a pattern.”

She smiles wider. The band’s tempo shifts to something slower. She can taste salt from the margarita at the corner of her mouth. She turns her head and his chin brushes her cheek. 

“An upward trend,” she says and Rust grunts in dissenting acknowledgment. It’s not so much a conversation they’re engaged in as it is fits and starts at speech. Two words from her, three from him, never adding up to complete sentences, merely hints at fuller ideas.  

“Or,” he says, his voice drops lower, “a continuing favor.” 

“It doesn’t do me any good,” she says it quickly, without thought, but she also says it quietly. A favor, she doesn’t say, is meant to do me some good.  

He shrugs small, the ripple of motion under her hands, against her chest. “Consider it another favor then: I let you believe you’re helping me.” Maggie loses the rhythm, but Rust doesn’t. She can’t decide if he’d be callous enough to intend to hurt her, but she finds it does all the same: hurt. Hollows out whatever she thought existed between the both of them. 

She does not reply and they go on dancing. Rust and Kathleen never see each other again. 

 

 

 

 

**17.**

In the future Maggie will not remember most of the context for all the fights she ever had with Marty. She will remember bits and pieces, which when cobbled together could illustrate a larger picture. A larger fight.  

She will remember Marty saying, “Wanting a person to ... to touch you sure ain’t the same thing as love.” 

Maggie with her hands clasped in her lap. Maggie sitting on the edge of the bed. Maggie regretting the concept of forgiveness. She will remember all of that. That Marty had been drunk, he had been late, she had been awake, she had yet to hear the name Lisa. 

“Sometimes it can feel like it is,” she had said. 

Maggie will remember less than she forgets. 

In the future Maggie will wonder how many people they have shared their marriage with. They, as a marriage, will always number at least three: Marty and Maggie and whoever threatens, tempts, successfully comes between them. 

 

 

 

 

**18.**

They meet in a bar this time instead of a diner. 

It’s one of those cheesy chains, the sort disgruntled coworkers decamp to after five o’clock for cheap beer and cheaper wings. She thinks that makes it neutral territory for the both of them: neither belongs here. 

Rust lights up a cigarette the second he’s seated.

“Gimme one of those,” she says, a quick tilt of her head. He takes the one he’s just lit from his mouth and passes it to her, a quick flick of his fingers towards her lips. Her fingers bump against his as she takes it from him, her initial inhale shallow and all for show, the smoke and the nicotine making her throat itch. Makes her feel stupid and seventeen again, down by the lake at her parents’ house, an illicit stash of purloined cigarettes and mostly empty bottles of her mother’s schnapps and her father’s whiskey. 

“I could frame this as a desire to see you and see Marty familial and comfortable again,” Rust says as prelude. “Or, I could phrase it as a longing to reclaim my place as my own.”

“Marty a bad houseguest?” She smirks, imagines dirty laundry and coffee filters in need of emptying, wet towels left on the bathroom floor. 

“Stinking like days’ old fish and all that.” His mouth quirks so she smiles fully until she’s not, picturing Marty. 

“Marty know you’re here?”

“Would the potential covert nature heighten or diminish this,” Rust says, neither a question nor an answer. 

Her skin prickles and she takes another small drag of his cigarette. They always only ever skirt the edge of a fight. Rust won’t engage with her on that level. He deflects. This makes her think of Marty. She draws a finger through the ring of condensation her beer left on the table, cutting it down the middle. 

“You think I’m being selfish,” she says, her voice sharper than she intended. 

“All humankind is selfish. It’s our singular innate talent. Our birthright, even.”

Her hair’s heavy. She gathers it up off her neck with one hand. “That’s not an answer.”

Rust leans into the table, closer to her. “And your question was a non-question.” He inhales deeply, exhales smoke, his cigarette still caught between his lips. “What you care how selfish I might find you – that’s not at issue here.”

She folds her arms. The bar is warm; her thighs stick to the booth. “Then you tell me what’s at issue here. 

“Your house. Your home. The family you made, the one you made with Marty.” He counts these things off, cigarette between his thumb and index finger.  “All that should be none my business, yet here I am, playing intermediary, trying to keep your house of cards in play.”

Maggie looks down at her hands, the length of ash hanging from the smoldering cigarette between her fingers. She can still taste the cold flat beer at the back of her throat.  

Rust’s voice has dropped and she meets his eye. “You think you’re gonna find some happiness in freedom. You think the one thing holding you back’s been that ring on your finger. You take that off, you take him off, freedom and happiness, one fell swoop. You think change is gonna mean something good, and maybe it could, maybe for you it would.” He pauses.

“But?” They’re at that edge again.  

“Could say, like they say: better the devil you know than the one you ain’t.”

“You could.”

He gets that look, like she could only ever imagine a fraction of the pain he knows. His daughter, his wife, how the man who sits across from her now is a different man than the one who had that life. 

“Or I could say this is your lot in life. This is your family. Someone’s gotta hold it together.”

Maggie doesn’t say anything. Rust continues, his voice pitched that much lower. “All this hurt, all this pain – you won’t remember any of it. Five years, ten years, fifty years down the line. You’ll be feeling something you think is fresh, is new, when it’s nothing more than this. The same. Again.”

Maggie watches him and can feel her eyes water. She bites the inside of her lower lip. He watches her in return. There’s the closest thing to gentleness she’s ever seen him wear, though tempered by something darker. She blinks rapidly, looks down as she swallows, clears her throat. 

“You think your experiences apply to everyone. You think your suffering has earned you insight, some kind of ... hard fought wisdom. You,” and she swallows again, her voice breaking, the spirit of cruelty building within her broken and she nods her head towards him, laughing because the alternative is too unbearable, “make for a terrible drinking buddy.”

 

 

 

 

**19.**

Maggie unplugs the answering machine. She yanks the cord, pulling the plug from the socket, Marty’s voice tinny and wrong and pleading –

and then nothing. 

Maggie stands there with her hands loose by her side, the cord at her feet like an uncoiled snake poised to strike. 

She’ll plug the answering machine back in before dinner. She’ll immediately press delete.

 

 

 

 

**20.**

Maggie mows the lawn, alone, at dusk. The girls are with her parents, novelty still found in their current situation, while Maggie worked a double at the hospital. Sweat pools at the hollow of her throat, her collarbone. Grass clippings stick to her bare legs and she’s furious. She gives herself over to that rage, cries a little to herself as she works her way in straight lines down the lawn, nothing to be heard over the mower. Wipes at her eyes with balled up fists as she idles at the edge of the yard. She stinks of fresh cut grass, antiseptic from the hospital, the faintest bit of old perfume from two birthdays ago. 

She leaves the mower in the yard like a discarded toy. She goes in through the garage, slams her hand against the button, and the door creaks down to close. 

 

 

 

 

**21.**  

Picture Lisa on the front stoop. Her eyes bright, furious, mouth red and nervous.

Maggie knew. She fucking knew. Her fingers curled. Her nails bit into the palm of her hands as she lifted her chin higher. The screen door divided them.

“Can I help you?” she asked all the same.

 

 

 

 

**22.**

Maggie wears: faded cotton underwear she buys in multi-packs at the Wal-Mart. Bras with the elastic stretched, the farthest clasp still leaving them too loose. She wears muted florals, conservative skirts that leave her legs pale and bare beneath. Maggie wears her hair loose and sometimes Marty used to call her beautiful. 

 

 

 

 

**23.**

Maggie sits with the girls. She holds one close while the other trips closer to the edge of the grass and the start of the road. The setting sun makes her blonde head shine and Maggie watches Audrey bob and weave. The lawn needs mowing again, the blades past her ankles. The humidity’s thick, the back of her neck damp. She can smell tar. She buries her nose in the crown of Macie’s head, breathes in deep. She squirms against Maggie, chases after her sister. Maggie sits alone, tucks her knees to her chest.

A storm in the air, her house empty, the grass grown too high.

  

 

 

 

**24.**

The second time Rust comes to her unexpected Marty still lives outside their house. 

Maggie answers the door in her robe. She pulls it tighter around herself, hiding an old t-shirt, the words South Padre Island faded, and a pair of panties. 

“You in the neighborhood?” she asks him over her shoulder. He follows her into the kitchen, hands shoved into pockets, eyes trained on the bare heels of her feet. 

“Sure,” he says, a beat too late. 

Maggie doesn’t know what to do with her hands so she clutches her robe closed. She puts the kettle on the stove, gas flickering flame to life. The only light on in the kitchen is the one over the counter where Rust sits, his face contoured in shadow, and if she didn’t know him, she might consider him ominous, a stranger with a face sketched from dark lines. Maggie stands in the dark by the stove, one hand braced on her hip. It occurs to her that she never asked him if he wanted tea. It occurs to her they have barely spoken to each other, a thought interrupted by the screaming of the tea kettle on the stove.  

They are at that edge again. She thinks this as she reaches for two mugs, up on tiptoe, can feel his eyes on her, her legs. She looks at him as she puts the mugs down in front of him and thinks: when I think of you I imagine you wrong. 

When she pours the tea, standing beside him, he grabs her by the wrist. His fingers are tight at first, his grip without mercy. It's unexpected and she misses his mug, spills onto the counter. When she looks him in the eye she expects to find him somewhere else, his gaze unfixed, miles and years away from her. But he is there. He is with her. He looks to her wrist before he looks to her face. His fingers loosen, play over the pop of bone, paper-thin skin at the base of her palm, the blue network of veins converging there, beneath. Maggie holds her breath.

“Tell me not to touch you and I’ll leave.” 

His voice is always distant rolling thunder, deep enough to almost hear, feel the vibration as he speaks. His voice is always a thing that threatens to break loose. It will not be until later, until after he leaves and her kitchen is her own once again, that she will consider what he said as a threat. 

So she places the kettle on the counter, ignores the spill. “Touch me,” she says, equal parts question and request. 

His hand slides from her wrist down the length of her forearm, slow drag of his fingertips as he pushes the sleeve of her robe up, seeking out more skin. Rust is a man strung too tight, all sinew, primed to attack – or run, perhaps. He doesn’t run.

Maggie kisses him first, tentative, kind, her lips brushing over his. Rust stands, holds her face between his hands, kisses her deeply. His mouth is inquisitive and demanding against her own, his hands, his body the same. He slips a hand under her robe, the collar of her t-shirt, his hand covering her bared shoulder. She pushes her body that much tighter against his, tasting stale cigarettes in his mouth, wet flesh, male and warm. 

Guilt doesn’t find her, not yet. Not when he turns her around, his hand on her bare stomach under her t-shirt, more intimate than it should be, as if he is holding her together, a hand pressed against the shelf of her ribcage. Like he’s cataloging her body. Like he is learning her as she learns to want. His chest to her back. His hand between her legs, already swollen and slick for him. It’s better that she can’t see his face. 

His fingers are thick inside her. They are surrounded by the silence of the kitchen, she is surrounded by him, the only noise to be found in their breathing, the sounds his body makes against her own.

The girls are in bed, she reminds herself. The girls are in bed. She chants this in her head, biting down on her tongue, feeling something akin to panic rising in her as she grabs at his arm, bucks back against him. She feels panic, lust, something darker, like an undertow, but not guilt. 

Maggie comes around his fingers, can feel Rust’s head drop down to her neck as she clenches around him, mouth wet against her throat as he sighs along with her. Like he’s found relief through her release.

He fucks her from behind, her body bent forward, the unfamiliarity of him inside her, all the minute differences between him and Marty enough to make her breath stick in her throat. Make her drop her head down, her face hidden by her hair. There’s an implicit violence in how he fucks her, a hand at the base of her throat, ceaseless aggression in the beat of his hips into her. His hand falls lower to palm her breast. Maggie tries to keep quiet, match him. All he does is breathe, sticky and wet, strands of her hair catching against his parted mouth. 

He pulls out of her, eyes the height of the counter island and then stumbles with her towards the kitchen table. The bare back of her thighs hit the edge before he lifts her. Just as quickly he pushes into her, a labored gasp of sound from him before he bites at her mouth. He’s louder now that he’s facing her, now that she can look at him and he can look at her. The sounds he makes scrape against her, needy and low, so she says his name, quiet, at the hinge of his jaw. A man strung too tight, and he snaps.

Maggie flat on her back with Rust over her, standing straight, their bodies forming a cross, the holiest, the most sacred thing she could imagine, fucking her ruthlessly, the inside of her wrist pressed to her mouth to keep her silent as she comes. 

After, he pulls her arm away from her mouth. He kisses that same spot her teeth had been. 

 

 

 

 

**25.**  

Second Book of the Kings. Chapter 20. Verse 1. Her mother’s favorite.

_Thus says the Lord, ‘set your house in order, for you shall die; you shall not recover.’_

Maggie opens the door to Marty three days later.

“Welcome home,” she says.

 

 

 

_fin._

 


End file.
